Traditionally, elections for public office in the United States have been conducted with voting systems utilizing hand-marked paper ballots. Typically, in such systems a paper ballot is issued to a verified voter by an election judge. The voter takes the ballot to a voting booth, where he or she manually marks his or her selections by placing marks or punch holes in marking spaces associated with the candidates he or she selects. The marked ballot is then taken by the voter to a ballot box where it is inserted and stored for subsequent hand or machine counting.
In recent years, the traditional system has been improved with the use of a ballot scanner to tally the hand-marked ballots as they are inserted into the ballot box. This has the advantage of making vote tallies immediately available at the close of polling, and, with scanners so-equipped, of preventing unintentional under-votes and over-votes. However, one drawback of the traditional system remains in that there is no provision for assisting voters who have a physical impairment, which would interfere with the manual marking of a ballot. Previous attempts at assisting such impaired voters have utilized electronic voting terminals wherein, instead of presenting candidate choices on a paper ballot, candidate choices are serially presented to the voter on large, easily viewable touch-screen displays. When the voter has made his or her selections, the results are tallied within the voting terminal, the total votes for each candidate being read from the terminal electronically or by means of a paper tape at the close of the polling place.
One drawback of electronic voting terminals is that there is no satisfactory means for auditing the voting process, i.e. confirming that each vote is tallied as voted, and that no votes are tallied which were not voted. Furthermore, there is no means for an individual voter to confirm that his or her vote has actually been counted. Attempts at addressing these deficiencies have centered on the use of a paper tape or slip printed concurrently with each voter's voting. Such tapes and slips, which bear little or no resemblance to a ballot, have proven difficult to interpret by the voter and do not confirm that the vote has been actually tallied.
These drawbacks are overcome by the ballot marking system and apparatus of the invention, wherein a pre-printed ballot issued to the voter is inserted into the ballot marking terminal of the invention, and the contests on the ballot are presented to the voter on a series of touch screen displays. After the voter enters and confirms his or her selections, the ballot is marked and returned to the voter for insertion into a scanner for tabulation and deposit in a ballot box.
Because of the need for the ballot marking terminal to accurately mark relatively small vote designation areas on the pre-printed ballot, it is necessary that the ballot be handled with great precision within the terminal, and that any rotation or skewing of the ballot be compensated for in the marking process. The present invention is directed to improvements in the ballot marking terminal wherein such compensation is accomplished with great accuracy.
Accordingly, it is the general object of the invention to provide a new and improved voting system, method and apparatus.
It is a more specific object of the invention to provide an improved voting system method and apparatus wherein a pre-printed ballot can be either hand-marked in a voting booth, or electronically marked with great precision at a ballot marking terminal by means of a visual or audio voter interface.
It is a more specific object of the present invention to provide a new and improved ballot marking system and apparatus wherein a pre-printed ballot is precisely marked in accordance with selections made by a video or audio interface with the voter.
It is a still more specific object of the invention to provide a ballot marking apparatus which includes means for compensating for rotation angles of ballots caused by skewing within the apparatus.